December 10, 2006

Congrats Ann: you you have now undermined if not destroyed the relevance of the Weblog Awards as a contest by readers about content and are, as such, have [sic] done a dissservice [sic] to the organizers of the Weblog Awards who have put a lot of time and energy into organizing this contest and you are forever corrupting this contest.

Ooh, the great and somber Weblog Awards! Corrupted! Disserved! Or should I say disssssssssserved? What a snake I am! Ooh, organizers put time and energy into creating such a lofty institution and here I am, fooling around. Oh, noooo!

And I love the way you perceived all that after it became painfully obvious that you were losing abysmally to the the "lady" blogger your blog attacked in demeaning and dishonest terms. And now you're all about indignant righteousness? What a laugh!

It is easy for me to say because no one gives a crap about my existence (bloggingly speaking), but these inter-blog spats are kind of annoying.

Note: I agree that what that blogger from the other blog said in your comments and some of his subsequent posts on that blog were intemperate, juvenile, rude and immoderate.

I suppose I, as more of a centrist, should be heartened by such squabbles because it may demonstrate that the center is fighting rather than ceding to the fringes. I would take that approach if the argument was substantive.

In other Weblog Awards-related news, Glenn Reynolds has declared himself Emperor Weblog Award Winner for Life and proclaims his royal highness is above the need to compete, which would impliedly question the legitimacy of his eternal mandate.

These awards are more of a joke than a high school student council election, and about as important.

Yeah, but they have such a nice banner to stick on your blog for a year if you win. :)

I looked at the explanation for the mysterious process by which nominees become finalists and it turns out it's just whichever blogs the guy personally thinks should be finalists, including blogs that weren't even nominated, with a preliminary step done by volunteers to make it appear there was more to it than that. I doubt they even looked at all the nominees, particularly in the less-paid-attention-to categories.

I don't know who is worse, Althouse for the way she is frenetically trolling for votes in this pathetic little vanity contest, or her sycophants, who seem so invested in the outcome.

I am comforted, though, by the small number of total votes, despite Althouse's hyperactive promotion. Since she and her closest minions have been probably voting 10 times a day on various computers, that leaves a very small number of people who actually voted spontaneously for this batshit crazy partisan.

For a number of reasons, I'm going through and looking at many of the blogs nominated in many categories. Not one that I've looked at doesn't campaign for votes, and some of them far more ostentatiously than Ann here.

(And no, DTL, I haven't looked at them all, so if the statement I'm about to make is contradicted by an exception I missed, that does not make me a "liar.")

The point of awards like this is not to confer merit or popularity. It's to promote the business. A rising blogosphere lifts all blogs. The "controversy" undoubtedly helps.

It's cute how they're ... withholding in protest. "No one vote. Pass it on. We just don't care." Very passive. Sad kindof. And now Glenn too. Is this some new metrosexual male technique I haven't heard of yet? Usually, running up the score is not classy. But I kindof hope you do remind folks to vote every day now. BLOW THEM OUT EVEN WORSE to end that kind of weany technique.

LoafingOaf said..."Yeah, but they have such a nice banner to stick on your blog for a year if you win. :)"

And not just for a year! The so-called Moderate Voice still has their "sticker" from the 2004 weblog awards on their masthead. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does clash a little with their newly-winted "we don't actually want to win" demeanor.

From TMV: There are two ways of dealing with something like this: get angry or laugh. We at TMV choose to laugh.

Bwa ha ha ha. Yeah. A light, frivolous sense of humor. A devil-may-care attitude about blog contests. That's exactly the impression I get when I read that blog post.

You didn't ruin anything, of course. the rules of the contest were deliberately crafted to encourage voting every day (so voters would be more interested in the results at the end). TMV knows this (well, whoever was dumb enough to make a NINE-HUNDRED WORD POST to show how little he cares about the contest, he might be that stupid)

And for all their talk about ruining the weblog awards, they were not only pimping their own blog, they were actively campaigning for blogs in other categories:

Well, you should not stop voting entirely, please continue to vote for David Schraub and for Ed Morrissey, but stop voting for The Moderate Voice in the "Best Centrist Blog" category.

Nothing in the rules of the contest was supposed to encourage cross-category alliances (you're supposed to vote for the blogs you like and actually read, not the blogs some conglomerate tells you to vote for). TMV wanted to flex its internet muscle, and they got beaten, badly, by the same woman who called them out when they were behaving badly (they knew it then, they know it now). Boo hoo hoo.

They make big sport of attacking you and saying how unlikeable you are (among other charming insults), and when an opportunity like this comes up to show you have lots of fans, they can't lose interest fast enough.

I find this really funny. First, the original author obviously completely misread Ann's post, having failed to detect the obvious humor. As I believe that he is Dutch, and English is not his first language, I'm willing to cut him some slack here. But, his refusal to even acknowledge his mistake when others there point it out to him is funny.

His fellow contributors then fail to give him a "heads up" about the humor involved in it before he digs himself (and them) into a deeper hole. Instead, they "rally 'round the flag." (Some might say they were "circling the wagons" in preparation for a siege.)

Nothing like a good blogwar to goose circulation, I guess. Absolutely hilarious.

Ann, your last comment makes me want to ask how you can confuse your sensibilities WITH a sense of humor? This post, and your website generally, seems to me spiteful, petty and vindictive. Some (perhaps many) find humor in those things, but it seems to be the same sense of humor that allows a bully to laugh at the pain of a younger kid he just beat up. Now, likening you to Tracy Flick...that seemed a bit of well-timed cleverness. I'll take my laughs that way. Find all the levity you want in pissing on things.